In the acts of Leipsic, the famous Leibnitz published a scheme of quite a different system, under the title of _Protogaea_. The earth, according to Bourguet and others, must end by fire; according to Leibnitz it began by it, and has suffered many more changes and revolutions than is imagined. The greatest part of the terrestrial matter was surrounded by violent flames at the time when Moses says light was divided from darkness. The planets, as well as the earth, were fixed stars, luminous of themselves. After having burnt a long time, he pretends that they were extinguished for want of combustible matter, and are become opaque bodies. The fire, by melting the matter, produced a vitrified crust, and the basis of all the matter which composes the globe is glass, of which sand and gravel are only fragments. The other kinds of earth are formed from a mixture of this sand, with fixed salts and water, and when the crust cooled, the humid particles, which were raised in form of vapours, refel, and formed the sea. They at first covered the whole surface, and even surmounted the highest mountains. According to this author, the shells, and other wrecks of the sea, which are every where to be found, positively prove that the sea has covered the whole earth; and the great quantity of fixed salts, sand, and other melted and calcined matters, which are included in the bowels of the earth, prove that the conflagration had been general, and that it preceded the existence of the sea. Although these thoughts are void of proofs, they are capital. The ideas have connection, the hypotheses are not impossible, and the consequences that may be drawn therefrom are not contradictory: but the grand defect of this theory is, that it is not applicable to the present state of the earth; it is the past which it explains, and this past is so far back, and has left us so few remains, that we may say what we please of it, and the probability will be in proportion as a man has talents to elucidate what he asserts. To affirm as Whiston has done, that the earth was originally a comet, or, with Leibnitz, that it has been a sun, is saying things equally possible or impossible, and to which it would be ridiculous to apply the rules of probability. To say that the sea formerly covered all the earth, that it surrounded the whole globe, and that it is for this reason shells are every where found, is not paying attention to a very essential point, the unity of the time of the creation; for if that was so, it must necessarily be admitted, that shell-fish, and other inhabitants of the sea, of which we find the remains in the internal part of the earth, existed long before man, and all terrestrial animals. Now, independent of the testimony of holy writ, is it not reasonable to think, that all animals and vegetables are nearly as ancient as each other?